The Sea and the Mirror:A Commentary on Shakespeare's The TempestW. H. AudenEdited and with an introduction by Arthur Kirsch

"The most significant of all Auden's unpatriotic Shakespearean forays of the 1940s, The Sea and the Mirror is a work of enormous skill, learning, and intelligence, a stylistic tour de force that is also freakish, polemical, confessional, and open-ended. It is a poem that comes much nearer to being a major salvo in Auden's cultural war with Little Englandism than it does to being the modest academic 'commentary' that on the title page it rather deviously declares itself to be. Arthur Kirsch's edition of this work is a fine addition to the canon of Auden scholarship. This book will fascinate all readers of Auden, and of Shakespeare."--Nicholas Jenkins